Karma Chameleon Culture Club

” Karma Chameleon ” is by Culture Club, the British new wave group. The song was written by George O’Dowd, Jon Moss, Mikey Craig, Roy Hay and Phil Pickett.
The song was produced by Steve Levine who has also worked with artists like Motorhead, Ziggy Marley and Gary Moore.
The single was taken from the group’s 1983 Album, Colour by Numbers which has sold over sixteen million copies worldwide.
It is widely acknowledged that the phrase ” Karma Chameleon ” was used by the Toots and the Maytals, the 1960s Jamaican reggae group for their song ” In The Dark “.
Lyrically the song is about alienation, George told the Los Angeles Times ” It’s so stupid when people say that the song isn’t about anything, It’s about this terrible fear of alienation that people have “.
Phil Pickett who is a double Ivor Novello Award winner and member of the 70s group Sailor played keyboards on the song with jud lander playing the harmonica with additional vocals supplied by Helen Terry.
” Karma Chameleon ” was a commercial success for Culture Club, in the United States the song was the group’s only Number One single on the Billboard Hot 100.
There the song spent three weeks at the top and a total of twenty-two weeks on the chart. The song was to be Culture Club’s fifth consecutive Top Ten single; they became the first act since the Beatles to get three Top Ten singles from their first Album.
Along with massive success in the United States, Culture Club also took ” Karma Chameleon ” to the top spot in sixteen countries worldwide.
In the United Kingdom ” Karma Chameleon ” became the group’s second chart-topping single after ” Do You Really Want To Hurt Me “.
Culture Club hit the top spot and stayed there for six weeks, spending ten weeks in the Top Ten and a total of twenty-one weeks on the UK Singles Chart.
To date the song is the 31st best-selling single of all time in the United Kingdom with sales of 1.49 million copies sold, with worldwide sales more than Five million copies, it has joined the best-selling singles of all time global list.
Once ” Karma Chameleon ” had become a hit across the World, the composers of the 1960 ” Handy Man ” by Jimmy Jones made some noise. They claimed that both songs were a little too close for comfort, George later admitted ” I might have heard it once, but it was certainly not something I sat down and copied. We gave them ten pence and an apple “.